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jigsaw

12 Learning Strategies and Their Ed Tech Tools

by Miguel Guhlin December 11, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

Created by author | Get the PDF version with clickable links here.

As you know, TCEA has spent the last few years diving deeply into the research of John Hattie and what strategies work best in schools today. The above PDF is a “12 days of Christmas” type of document that fuses 12 highly effective instructional strategies (for all grade levels and content areas) and the digital tools that can best support them. Explore the definitions and research behind the learning intentions (LI) outlined above, in the sections below.

Did You Know?

You can sign up for the TCEA online, self-paced course, Strategies That Work: Part 1, which explores core strategies in more detail.

Learning Intentions (LI): Core Components

Teacher Clarity (d=0.76): Set clear lesson learning intentions (LI) that describe skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values that students need to learn. LI: Core.
Success Criteria (d=0.88): Co-created with students, they are the standards by which projects are judged. Digital Tools: Quick Rubric, RubricMaker, RubiStar, Google Classroom/Teams rubrics. LI: Core.
Feedback (d=0.64): Information that reduces the gap between what I am doing and what I should be doing. Digital Tools: Microsoft OneNote, Google Docs Spoken Feedback. LI: Core.

Get TCEA Educator Certified

Sign up for the TCEA online, self-paced course, Strategies That Work: Part 2, which explores surface learning strategies in more detail.

Learning Intentions (LI): Surface Learning

Jigsaw Method (d=1.20): The 3-step jigsaw engages students in part to whole conversations that deepen understanding. Digital Tools: Google Sites, MS OneNote, Breakout Rooms w/ organizer. LI: Surface Learning.
Summarization (d=0.74): Identify what’s worth keeping and what’s not. Digital Tools: Diigo, Yawas Highlighter, Now Comment, Comic/Graphic Novels. LI: Surface Learning.
Vocabulary Programs (d=0.64): Multiple strategies such as morphology, semantic maps/Frayer Model, word/concept sorts, and wide reading. Digital Tools: yED Live, Google Slides and more. LI: Surface Learning.

Learning Intentions (LI): Deep Learning

Reciprocal Teaching (d=0.74): Four-step strategy that engages students in summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting about text/media. Digital Tools: Actively Learn, Flipgrid, Seesaw, Nearpod. LI: Deep Learning.
Outlining and Summarizing (d=0.66): Identify main ideas and supporting ideas and then put them in your own words. Digital Tools: Buncee, Diigo Outliner, yED Live, MindJet. LI: Deep Learning.
Concept Mapping (d=0.64): Graphic organization of concepts. Digital Tools: Bubbl.us, iOS apps, Popplet, Prezi, Google Drawing, OneNote. LI: Deep Learning.

Learning Intentions (LI): Transfer Learning

Self-Reported Grades (d=1.33): Students assess their own work and then compare it to a standard from the teacher. Digital Tools: Read this blog entry. LI: Transfer Learning.
Strategy to Integrate with Prior Knowledge (d=0.93): Create a cognitive map via more text connections to improve recall and comprehension. Digital Tools: Buncee, Cornell Note-Taking, Graphic Organizers. LI: Transfer.
Problem-Solving Teaching (d=0.68):
Solve a problem you don’t already know how to solve, applying learned skills to novel situations. Digital Tools: Minecraft, Google Slides. LI: Transfer.
See the 12th strategy (and more) online at https://go.mgpd.org/hest and learn about Hattie at TCEA TechNotes blog.

Feature Image Source

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

December 11, 2020 0 comment

Remote Learning Strategy #3: Three More

by Miguel Guhlin October 20, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

In our Remote Learning Strategies series so far, we’ve explored two powerful strategies. Those strategies included classroom discussion and summarization. In this blog entry, we’ll review three more strategies that teachers should use. Ready for a whirlwind review of evidence-based strategies?

Strategy #3: Teacher Credibility

“One high-effect size instructional strategy would be teacher credibility,” says a teacher. She points out that understanding what she is teaching garners trust. Students respect her more when they understand what she is teaching and why. Of course, knowing the research about how to teach is important. To convey her confidence, she relies on screencasting (e.g. Screencastify).

Did You Know?

You can explore teacher credibility, along with other core strategies, via the TCEA self-paced, online course. The course Strategies That Work*: Core Components* explores evidence-based strategies and how to use them in the classroom and is now available.

When you think of teacher credibility, know that it is about perception. Teachers convey competence, trustworthiness, and caring. Students have to be answer affirmatively when they ask themselves, “Is this someone I can turn to?” (Source: Visible Learning Meta X database).

How do you influence student perception? One way might be to meet these three criteria:

Show up on time
Be prepared to teach
Have a thorough understanding of the content and be able to explain why learning it is important

Technology can assist some teachers in appearing as experts. For an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher focused on phonics, a digital platform such as ESL Games works well. When I first saw the website, I was a bit worried because it looked like it was just games focused on pronouncing words and learning vocabulary. Then I realized I had a bit of “old research” stuck in my head that needed replacing.

As a third grade student, I had learned phonics growing up as a second language learner. As a teacher in training, my professors denied the efficacy of phonics. Yet, it turns out they were wrong.

Reading comprehension is the product of two things. First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she sounded out.

Many educators don’t know this.

That’s because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools. Nor has it made it into many schools of education (Source: At A Loss for Words). More reading on vocabulary.

Can a credible teacher admit they are wrong? I’d like to think so. This next strategy taps into several other evidence-based strategies. Lori Oczkus (@LoriOczkus) terms these strategies as the “Fab Four” in her book Reciprocal Teaching At Work. John Hattie writes the foreword.

teacher credibility

Strategy #4: Reciprocal Teaching

“One high-effect size instructional strategy is reciprocal teaching,” says one educator. She goes on to say:

I love this one and I am learning more about this. The tool to help with it is Seesaw as you can see how they are processing and understanding of your teaching.

Reciprocal teaching aims at improving reading comprehension across all subject areas. It does this through the use of four strategies, including:

Summarizing
Questioning
Clarifying
Predicting

The teacher and students take turns leading dialogue about the text or media in question. They ask questions geared toward the role a person has assumed. One teacher relies on Zoom to engage in active monitoring of students’ use of the strategies.

Consider how this teacher uses Zoom:

Incorporating active monitoring by having students show me their work during ZOOM! I also love using the chat as a way for students to answer intro questions!

Other teachers rely on NearPod. They share informational text so that students have summaries and questions. Then, students make their own clarification statements and predict how something will work. “NearPod allows me to see all students working. I can provide instantaneous feedback as necessary.”

A final approach involves students using reciprocal teaching via Google Slides. “Do this when you use an organizer via a Google Slide.” She goes on to explain the directions in this way:

First, divide students into break out rooms.
Second, allow students to discuss and complete their respective roles in the team.

Reciprocal teaching has proven effective for K-12 and adult learners in my experience. Yet, it is a deep learning strategy for when deeper learning of already mastered basic concepts is needed. When introducing students to brand new information, consider using the jigsaw approach instead. Let’s explore that next.

Strategy #5: The Jigsaw Method

Explored in detail in other blog entries, this surface learning strategy is great at introducing new information. The Visible Learning Meta X database describes it in this way:

The Jigsaw instructional method is a cooperative approach to learning originally developed by Elliot Aronson. Following this method, a teacher introduces a main topic and several subtopics.

Jigsaw students are broken into “home groups”, and each member of the home group is assigned a subtopic. Then, students form expert groups to study their assigned subtopic through research and discussion.

After the students have mastered the subtopic in question, they return to their home group to report on their findings. At the conclusion of the exercise, each home group member has learned about each subtopic from a member of the relevant expert group or through their own investigation with an expert group.

One way that teachers are using jigsaw in remote learning involves Google Slides. This approach lends itself for use in the regular or hybrid classroom as well.

To use the jigsaw method with Google Slides, assign expert groups a collaborative slide deck. Each student adds their info to the expert group slide. Comments within the slide deck make up the final presentation slide(s). At the end, each expert group member copies the slide/s to the “table group” slide deck. They include any explanation in the slide comments or as an embedded video.

Aside from Google Slides, Google Classroom was also mentioned. “I love the idea of using Jigsaw in the classroom.” That teacher describes it in this way:

Teachers can divide roles and create prompts in Google Docs. Then they can be assigned in Google Classroom. Teachers can later have students work as a whole by having them collaborate on a final group Doc.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll explore more ways that teachers are matching up digital tools with high-effect size strategies. Stay tuned!

October 20, 2020 0 comment

Good Teaching Professional Learning

Napkin PD: PBL Your Jigsaw

by Miguel Guhlin April 9, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

What happens when you combine two instructional strategies like PBL and jigsaw? That’s exactly what I did when developing a new workshop for the TCEA 2020 Convention & Exposition called Coaching for Strategic Technology Integration. My initial results? Positive. In this edition of napkin-PD, I share the results of the new structure of my experimentation.

Session Description: Ready to set your students and teachers up for learning success? You will need be strategic. In this session, learn how to blend four components into one. You will adopt high effect size instructional strategies. Then, use a process for blending technology into learning experience. Finally, reflect on a pupil-focused results coaching tool.

Essential Elements

In each of my napkin-PD sessions, I focus on organizing the entire workshop into three chunks. Those three chunks may vary a bit in title, but generally fall into these areas:

Explore. This is where participants learn something new. They are developing background knowledge on a subject.
Adapt/Create. This is where they make connections between new information and old.
Share. They create something tangible.

For the 50-minute session of this 90-120 minute learning event, I had to truncate some of the activities or drop them altogether. Let’s take a deeper look.

pbl your jigsaw

Revisiting the Objectives

In my session, I wanted to achieve the following objectives. You’ll note that I have attempted to word them as “teacher clarity goals.” The reason why is that the teacher clarity strategy is a high-effect size strategy with an effect size of .76. Here’s a little background on teacher clarity if you are not familiar with it:

Teacher clarity relates to organization, explanation, examples and guided practice, and assessment of student learning. It can involve clearly communicating the intentions of the lessons and the success criteria.

Clear learning intentions describe the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values that the student needs to learn

There are a lot of ways to use technology to support teacher clarity. In this case, I decided to be up front with adult learners and so told them what my goals were at the start of the session:

Today we will examine, explore, and reflect how to achieve academic standards. We will do this through the combination of several components. Those components include high-effect size instructional strategies, strategic technology, and pupil-centric coaching efforts.
So we can construct learning experiences for students and staff that will lead to accelerated learning and growth.
We will know we have it when we reflect on our use of action steps via educational frameworks that provide insight into our work.

To organize this learning adventure, I divided it into three big pieces.

Did You Know?

Sign up for one of our Google Certified Educator certifications. You’ll learn about more than Google Meet, as well as earn 12 CPE hours per course. Use these courses to get Google Educator certified. Find out more online.

Chunking Learning into Modules

pbl your jigsaw Creating bite-sized chunks can be a lifesaver for learners. It makes the learning manageable, memorable, and improves comprehension (source). For adult learning participants, it gives them autonomy within each chunk. That is, they can explore content as they choose. It also enabled me as the lesson designer to take complex content and make it easier to process in the short time available.

The main pieces, which I further chunked into smaller bites, included:

Meet the Problem. “There’s a big school board meeting coming up. Your superintendent needs you at Central Office right away. Drop what you’re working on and head on over there.”
Crafting Your Solution. Now’s the time to put your heads together to craft the best presentation you can that combines the four key elements.
Reflect. Take a moment to reflect on the process. Explore the gap between where your organization is now and the ideal and then reflect the ideal in your team’s presentation with steps to get there.

Each section involved more work.

pbl your jigsaw

Smaller Bite-Sized Chunks

To get people moving in the right direction, I introduced a problem via role play. This involved casting some audience members (I recruited them as they arrived). The unlucky folks stepped into the role outlined in the problem below. Here’s the call to action, although you can read the whole scene online:

“Our school board president and I have spoken. Our scores say we are treading water, maintaining the status quo. For some districts, that would be enough. But here in our district, we must have a focus on accelerating student growth more than one year.”

“We have agreed that we’re going to put together a plan for moving forward, a plan that accelerates growth for ALL students. For too long, we’ve been working in silos with several initiatives. We will put those together. We will be successful, we will ensure accelerated student growth is our TOP priority.”

“I’m going to ask you to divide up into several teams to deepen your knowledge. You will become an expert in your area, then share it back with your team. Afterwards, you’ll make a first effort at putting together a board meeting presentation.”

“I want you to know that I’m counting on you. The future of our district is in your hands. Ready to begin? If so, I’m going to turn it over to Miguel to get this started.”

If you’re familiar with PBL, you know this is an ill-structured, messy problem. My goal with this problem was to set up (and this is what’s different from other napkin PD) a jigsaw activity.

Revisiting the Jigsaw Method

Wait, wait, why am I using a jigsaw? The goal of this workshop was to introduce participants to some amazing ideas. This made it a surface learning activity, that is, an activity focused on introducing new concepts to students. Why use a jigsaw? The jigsaw method enjoys an effect size of 1.20, which is very high, and is a cooperative approach to learning. You can learn more about it through other blog entries, but here is a quick overview:

Following this method, a teacher introduces a main topic and several subtopics. Jigsaw students divide into “home groups,” and each member of the home group chooses a subtopic.

Then, students form expert groups to study their assigned subtopic. They do this through research and discussion.

After delving into the subtopic, they return to their home group to report on their findings.

At the conclusion, each home group member has learned about each subtopic. They have learned from their own investigation or a member of the relevant expert group.

The other strategy in use is problem-solving teaching (.68 effect size). I regret that in a 50-minute session, there wasn’t time. We couldn’t get to the part that had participants solve a new problem.

pbl your jigsaw

Turning a PBL into a Jigsaw Activity

This is the part I was most excited about. Could I embed a jigsaw activity inside of a PBL? The answer is, “Yes, you can.” Each of the four member teams would join their expert group. Expert groups worked alone at first, then together to explore the project stations. I provided paper copies of a digital organizer. Of course, some chose to use the digital version on their devices.

pbl your jigsaw

Project Stations

pbl your jigsaw The project stations focused on four key areas. Those areas included:

Putting these components together was not obvious to me. In fact, I outlined everything ahead of time because outlining made it a lot easier for me. You can see my first draft outline, although it had a few more revisions. In the end, the organization of each station followed a pattern.

Project Station Organization

Picture and overview
Contained three parts, in no particular order:
1. Watch the video. This included a video and a short summary of the content.
2. More material to explore
3. Explore
An expert discussion question

When I revise each of the project stations in the future, I will be more deliberate about structuring them. That is, I will make each part focus on media type and action desired. For example, here’s a revised outline:

Overview with picture
- 1: Watch the video
- 2: Explore source material
- 3: See examples
An expert discussion question

Now, if you are familiar with the jigsaw method, you may see that I included an extra piece. That extra piece is the expert group discussion question. I wanted to focus experts’ discussion given the time constraint. This had the desired effect.

pbl your jigsaw

Listening in on Participant Conversations

One of the most rewarding aspects of the jigsaw method is listening to expert groups dig deep. But having them report back to their home groups can be a joy as well. After the time was up, I invited insight sharing from the whole group. What amazed me was the depth of insight. Participants reflected the information provided in the project stations. In a way most curious, they owned the information as they shared it. This was fantastic and I couldn’t have been more delighted with their work.

pbl your jigsaw

Reflection

As time elapsed, I realized that we had spent the entire time on the jigsaw. To have executed this workshop, an entire 90-120 minutes would have been desirable. I am still pleased with the first module work, especially as participants expressed how happy they were with the juxtaposition of these ideas.

Want to schedule TCEA professional development that focuses on project-based learning? Fill out a TCEA logistics form. We can help you turn your napkin professional development plans into a reality. And be sure to check out other“napkin PD” blogs here.

April 9, 2020 0 comment

Good Teaching Professional Learning

Reflections: The Jigsaw Method in My Workshop

by Miguel Guhlin September 23, 2019

written by Miguel Guhlin

“I was using jigsaw with my students before,” said the science teacher at a private school. “Now that I know its effect size, I’m going to be using it even more.” The insight about the jigsaw strategy popped up after discussing John Hattie’s meta-analysis. If you’re not familiar with it, he analyzed a lot of research. His meta-analyses identified the effect size of instructional strategies used in schools today. Let’s take a moment to see how jigsaw works and in the context of educational technology.

The Jigsaw Method

“The Jigsaw Method is a teaching strategy. It is useful for organizing student group work,” says Jordan Catapano. “It helps students collaborate and rely on one another.” John Hattie found the jigsaw method to have an effect size of 1.2. What does that mean? Consider that the average growth any student experiences over an academic year is .40. This means that using jigsaw in a consistent manner can accelerate student growth. Students in your classroom will see greater than one year’s growth with the jigsaw.

As I was working on my PBL with Minecraft: Education Edition session, I realized I had a lot of resources to share. I asked myself, “Would the jigsaw method work well enough to get the job done?” Before I share how that worked out, it might be worth reviewing how the jigsaw method works.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey suggest there are three types of jigsaw methods. After reviewing their list, I realize that they are right.

Approach #1: Jigsaw as Divide and Conquer (One-Step Jigsaw)

This was my first introduction to the term “jigsaw.” This ineffective application of the label serves as a way to divide a long article into pieces. Each group member takes a piece, then summarizes it for the small group (or large group).

Fisher and Frey share their opinion about this:

This “one-step” approach isn’t a jigsaw; it’s a divide-and-conquer approach to text. When teachers experience “jigsaw” in this way, they’re likely to replicate it incorrectly in their classrooms. Harm may be done as less effective readers share misinformation with the group and everyone’s understanding is compromised.

This approach may not be the best one to replicate.

Approach #2: Home and Expert Groups (Two-Step Jigsaw)

Only this summer did I attempt the home and expert groups approach to jigsaw. The process involved grouping students into “home” groups. Then, students chose one resource of the available list. Once students decided on their resource, they formed up into “expert” groups. The expert groups worked to plumb the depths of the same article. Then they discussed their takeaways with each other in their respective home groups. Here’s a link to the organizer my students used in Google Docs format.

jigsaw

This approach falls short as well, although not as much as the first approach. Frey and Fisher point out the following:

In this type of activity, learners still don’t have the opportunity to discuss how their assigned part fits within the whole text; groups just report on the particular section they read. And the critical thinking that’s accomplished through analysis and synthesis doesn’t happen.

How do you get students to do more than report on the particular section they have read? More important, how do you make analysis and synthesis to happen?

Approach #3: True Jigsaw (Three-Step Jigsaw)

The critical third step of the three-step jigsaw involves students returning to their expert groups. Once back in expert groups, they discuss how their part fits into the whole. Fisher and Frey describe it in this way:

In the third phase of the jigsaw, students return to their expert groups and discuss how their passage fits into the whole text, based on their discussions with their home group. The point of this third phase is to have students engage in a part-to-whole conversation in which they arrive at a deeper understanding about the text and its implications.

Students think about their thinking (metacognition) and synthesize and analyze ideas contained within the complete text. This process requires that students listen carefully to their peers and analyze the ways in which each part contributes to the entire text.

As you can see, step three of the this jigsaw approach involves heavy lifting. As such, I see the phases of movement as follows now:

Divide students into home groups to split up portions of text or resources.
Set up a way for students to group according to expert groups to explore their specific area.
Regroup into home groups to discuss findings.
Split into expert groups to consider the whole in light of specific area.

This constant movement of students from one group to another can be awkward. But let’s not forget how important movement is to the human brain and learning efforts. Without this heavy lifting, the jigsaw method in use may not be as effective. As you reflect on how you are using jigsaw in your classroom, which approach have you taken?

jigsaw

Reflections: The Jigsaw Method in My Workshop

In my face-to-face workshop, I relied on the two-step jigsaw. Rather than use a single resource split up into passages, I shared resources relevant to a theme. The theme? PBL in the Minecraft: Education Edition classroom. As I implemented it, students did not achieve the critical third level, but the activity did achieve my intended goal. Some of the participants were quite forceful in sharing their perspectives. You can see how this activity appears in my session materials. Visit Activity #1 – Exploring Possibilities to see it in action.

Some revisions I would make now that I know about the three-step jigsaw include:

Include a quiz or performance task at the end of the two-step version of the jigsaw. This would fall into step right after phase three movement.
Use some kind of metacognitive aid or scaffold (concept map?) to capture student discussion in the phase four movement. That’s the third step of the three-step jigsaw. In this phase, students move back into expert groups to discuss their learning in context of the whole.

What are your thoughts on the jigsaw approach and its use for professional learning or in your classroom?

September 23, 2019 4 comments

Good Teaching

The Power of the Jigsaw

by Lori Gracey September 4, 2019

written by Lori Gracey

As educators, we are always looking for the best ways to help our students learn. Whether it’s a different instructional strategy or a new tech tool, we want to know that what we are spending our time on is worthwhile and will accelerate learning and retention. If you’ve been following TCEA for the past year, you’ll know that we have embraced the work of John Hattie to help us determine what truly works in education. In this blog, we’ll look at one of the most powerful (and easy to implement) strategies that his research shows we should be using: the jigsaw method.

Why the Jigsaw Method Matters

Hattie’s research is based on 25 years of work and more than 1,500 meta-analyses of 90,000 studies involving more than 300 million students. That’s true validity. He examined all of the instructional practices that we use in education and rank ordered them based on their effect size. “Hattie found that the average effect size of all the interventions he studied was 0.40.” (Source)

So we know that an effect size of 0.4 means an average year of growth/learning for a student. The jigsaw method, however, has an effect size of 1.20, which means that if it’s done correctly and regularly, students will grow three years in the space of that one year. That’s powerful!

The method also has other benefits, including (source):

Direct engagement by the students with the material to be learned instead of having material presented to them, which fosters depth of understanding
Practice in self-teaching, which is one of the most valuable skills we can help them learn
Practice in peer teaching, which requires them to understand the material at a deeper level than students typically do when simply asked to produce on an exam
Improvement in social-emotional learning, including increased feelings of autonomy, competence, and intrinsic motivation (Hänze & Berger, 2007)
Speaking the language of the discipline and thus becoming more fluent in the use of discipline-based terminology
Contributing to the group
Encouraging cooperation and active learning and promoting the valuing of all students’ contributions

How to Jigsaw

The jigsaw method is based on the idea that students learn best when they have to teach others. Before the process can begin, the teacher must first examine the content that the students are to learn and divide it up into manageable chunks. In an ideal situation, there would be four, five, or six sections of material that must be studied. The number of sections determines the size of the groups for the rest of the work as each student in a group takes responsibility for teaching one chunk to the rest of the group.

Divide students into groups. These will be the Home Groups. Groups should be diverse and set by the teacher, at least while students are learning the process. Jigsaw works best if there are the same number of students in each group.
Assign one chunk of content to each person in the Home Group. You can do this by having them count off or by drawing straws or even, once they’re familiar with the process, by letting the students pick the chunk they want to be responsible for.
Provide the content to the students (more on what that can look like later) and allow them time to individually and silently study it.
Have the students now move to meet with their Expert Groups. This is where all of the students with the same chunk of material gather together to better master the content. They compare their ideas about the content and then, as an Expert Group, prepare a visual aid to use when they return to their Home Groups to teach. The visual aid can be notes, a graphic organizer, a drawing, a presentation, or anything they want. But they all work on it together to ensure that critical information about the content is included and is clear.
Students now return to their original Home Groups where each student takes a turn presenting his/her chunk. The other students listen carefully and should take notes or use a graphic organizer to jot down ideas. Questions are encouraged.
To ensure that metacognition about the whole, and not just individual, expert learning, students meet one more time in their Expert Groups to discuss the whole content in light of their specific chunk of material.
Students are now individually assessed on all of the chunks to see if there are any gaps or misconceptions in the content learned. This can be for a grade or just for the teacher’s knowledge.

Adding Technology

Technology offers a powerful way to provide chunked content in this method. Here’s an example I use when I am teaching people how to do the jigsaw (by jigsawing, of course). I have four chunks of content for them to learn and so there are four people per group. In their Home Groups, each person draws an emoji from laminated examples I set out and each emoji then corresponds to one chunk of the material. (I don’t show them the corresponding emojis until after they’ve drawn their own.) All of the content is posted on a Google Site for them to access, including text, websites, and video clips. They can then work through their content as they need to. If I see that there is confusion about an idea, I can add clarifying content to the Site that they can access as we work.

You can also encourage students to use technology to create their Expert presentation/notes. Some Expert Groups might want to create a paper slide or a screencast or quick video, as well as the more common Google Drawing, PowerPoint, or graphic organizer. Allow them to choose how they will share their learning; it’s more powerful that way.

Other Jigsaw Tips

If you don’t have the right number of students to evenly divide the groups, you can assign two students in one group to the same chunk of content to be learned. This may also help when you have a weak or struggling student who could use a little help.

If you have a student who doesn’t seem to want to take ownership of his/her content, you can use the Jigsaw II method. It’s exactly the same as the Jigsaw I method listed above, but does add one step at the end regarding the assessment. In Jigsaw I, students are assessed individually and receive just one score. In Jigsaw II, they still receive an individual score. But they also receive a second score that is the average of the group’s score. This builds in competition between groups and individual group peer pressure to perform at their highest level.

There’s also a Jigsaw III with time given for the Home Groups to review each other before the assessment and a Jigsaw IV where the teacher begins the unit of study by introducing the material (but not teaching all of it!).

Interested in learning more about the jigsaw method and how it can accelerate student learning in your classroom? Join us for a free-to-members webinar on January 15, 2020 at 11:45 a.m.

The jigsaw method is one of the most powerful learning strategies you can use as a classroom teacher or professional development provider. I would recommend you try it once a week in your classroom. And please feel free to contact me with any questions about it or if you would like more information. Remember, with TCEA, you’ve got this!

September 4, 2019 0 comment